79 Essays

I like that these selected essays do not really directly deal with “good” design for the most part.  While the Bierut, the author, does touch on examples of what he considers to be successful and unsuccessful, these essays focus more on the exterior facets of design culture that influence good design.  For example, ‘How to Become Famous’ contains very little about the actual visual aesthetics of design apart from arbitrary recommendations on how to submit work to a judged show.  Even these suggestions are merely “make it big” and “make it look cool”, but do not touch on the artistic reasoning behind these.

I found these essays to be very interesting because it gives a glimpse of what my potential professional career has in store for me on a socio-cultural level.  I don’t consider myself to be a designer at heart; I am a graffiti artist who is struggling to find a profitable legal avenue for my talents.  The culture of design is not something that I was born into or even ascribed to before I started studying it in college.  Reading these essays shows me, on a very basic level, how one example of a famous and successful designer thinks.  I am not saying that I need to drop my own thought processes (that have gotten me to where I am today) in order to prescribe myself to Bierut’s, but that I do need to be cognizant of them to wade through the graphic design culture.

I really enjoyed the essay on plagiarism especially.  Though these ideas are not new in art it is still humbling when someone in Bierut’s position admits the artistic plagiarism paradigm does, in fact, apply to them as well.  Personally I believe that the more work that I see and steal as an artist, the more I can change and tweak them to fit my own needs.  All of these ideas get added to a repertoire that I can utilize at any time, for any purpose, to solve any problem.  The only art that I’ve probably ever made that are truly original were my very first drawings from preschool, before I had any conception of what ‘art’ meant.  Everything after that age was probably more related to Bierut’s last essay than I would normally be comfortable admitting.